A poll

[Poll #1822475]

A poll

[Poll #1822475]

Boom Baby Boom!

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Emily Lakdawalla's "What's up in the solar system in March 2012"

The event that will probably generate the most planetary news in March is the 43rd annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (Twitter hashtag: #LPSC43), which will take place from March 19-23 in Houston, Texas. Geologists who study solid surfaces from planets to space dust and from Mercury to Saturn will be presenting updates on their latest work with data from spacecraft and laboratory. I was forced to skip it last year, so I'm very excited to be able to attend the whole thing this year! As always, I will be wishing I could clone myself to attend more sessions, and would be very happy for volunteers who would be willing to share their notes with me, or even to write a guest blog entry or two.

How is it

Ringworld caught the public's imagination well enough to remain in print for decades whereas this book



went out of print within the decade? Sure, Ringworld has a ringworld but Farthest Star has a Dyson shell as an intergalactic space craft. Farthest Star does admittedly have some pulp sensibilities but I think we're all agreed Ringworld, grand vistas aside, is somewhat bland.

Hope the series is better than the trailer

Because the trailer reminds me of a million zillion things I've seen already.

All Alone in the Night - Time-lapse footage of the Earth as seen from the ISS

Dear SF writers: please consider this the minumum bar you need to clear to dazzle me with spectacle.

SFWA reacts to recent Amazon actions

SFWA is redirecting Amazon.com links from the organization’s website to other booksellers because we would prefer to send traffic to stores where the books can actually be purchased.

Colonialism's gift to humanity

HIV-1 group M's highway out of an obscure corner of southeastern Cameroon.

(usual comment warnings apply)

Surely this cannot be correct?

Dear publishers and sci-fi authors: This is just epic sadness. Only eight new SF books hit the shelves in March, and it can’t just be because we sent the steampunks, alt history and weird west over to the “Genre Benders” listings (coming up tomorrow). Where, oh where, has the science fiction gone?

"This is the part of the program where Big Bird defies a god [...]"

I was a hard-core Sesame Street viewer from about 1979 to 1984, and my memories of the show are the sort of deep nostalgic tangle you'd expect, with a great deal of idiosyncratic noise blended into the signal. So, for many years, I carried around a vague but emotionally vivid recollection of a Sesame Street episode in which Big Bird and Snuffleupagus had witnessed the the passage of a soul to the ancient Egyptian afterlife, complete with the weighing of the human heart against a feather. I shit you not.

A poll

[Poll #1822740]

A poll

[Poll #1822740]